Content Creation; How to Plan for Great Content

Content creation is the lifeblood of any website as this is the whole point to a website. Despite this, there are still a huge amount of people that pay more attention to link building, getting Twitter followers and a number of other factors more than they pay attention to content. A lot of people are still building content that is “bog-standard” and then spending all of their time on SEO. Whilst this might work to some extent, there is absolutely no reason that you shouldn’t be spending the most time on your content as this will be rewarding in the long run.

A lot of people don’t tend to plan their content and will often just write when they feel like it. This is good, but you always need to bare in mind that having a plan is definitely going to help you.

Making Sure You Understand Your Audience

Use twitter to reach out with your audience.

This is probably one of the most crucial factors when it comes to writing content these days. Let’s say that you have a website about eating healthily and you’re getting a decent amount of visitors a month. You need to know who you are aiming your content at in order to write it for the specific audience you have.

Let’s say that you have 50,000 visitors a month, you need to be asking yourself; how old are these people? what sex are they? where are they from? are they educated? Of course ,there are a lot of tools that can estimate this for you including Google Analytics and other analytics software. It is good to implement these in order to obtain information about what your audience is like.

If you discover that your audience is mainly well-educated women that are aged 30 – 50, you are probably going to want to write in quite a civil manor and in a manner that is well written and well-spoken. However, if you find that your audience is mainly 15 – 20 year old, male teenagers, you are going to want to write your content in a completely different style.

You will also need to adjust exactly what the subject of your content is depending on your audience. A post about Justin Biebers new song might be great for a teenage audience but if you’re attracting an older audience, they probably won’t really care.

Understanding Your Brand

Apple – the masters of branding.

Your brand and your audience are closely intertwined but you need to understand your brand as much as possible. A brand is everything about your website, it’s the image that your give yourself. This can be through the design of your site, the subject of your content and even the way that things are written and laid out.

If you are branding yourself well, every piece of content that you produce should incorporate your brand. Your brand might be a light-hearted website with cheeky content or it could be an extremely controversial website with content that could offend people. It could also be the opposite, straight-laced content that is written to a degree-level and giving only facts.

Understanding your brand properly will not only help you to produce great content but will in turn, help you to grow your audience too.

Analyse Traffic Sources

Use Google Analytics to help analyse your traffic and audience.

Strangely, I think that analysing your traffic source is going to help you to write better content. If you are getting a vast quantity of your visitors from the search engines, then you are probably going to want to write content that is keyword-optimised and has a high chance of getting good rankings.

However, if you are getting a huge amount of your visitors from your social media following, perhaps on Facebook and Twitter, you need to think about what these people want to see the most. If you have a good following, you can even ask them what content their might want to see next and have a survey.

Ideally, you would want to incorporate the best of both worlds and have keyword-optimised content that is also going to attract visits from your social media following.

Brainstorm Ideas

When you are thinking of content there will often be a lot of ideas in your head. It is good to brainstorm all of these and write them down on paper or on your computer. Once you have a decent set of ideas, you can start sifting through them and deciding which ones will be best for your particular audience and which pieces of content will fit into your particular brand.

You might find that you came up with some pretty crazy ideas that would not have been good, and you might find that you came up with some great ideas that you didn’t realise were so great until later on.

It also helps to get other peoples input. Ask your visitors what they would like to see if possible as we previously mentioned but if not, ask a friend or a work colleague. A collective brainstorm is always going to be better than a singular brainstorm.

Conclusion

Good content isn’t just about picking a keyword and writing 500 words to fill the space, its about creating something that people are going to want to read and that people are going to want to share. It’s about knowing your audience and writing content with them in mind, covering topics that you know they are going to want to read about in a way that they are going to feel comfortable reading it.

It is certainly no easy task and with almost every subject having a huge amount of competition these days, it is going to be harder than ever to come up with a piece of content that is truly going to be original and offer something to your readers, as well as attract links and social media engagement.